(1) Field of the Invention
The invention pertains generally to hospitality media and entertainment systems. More particularly, the invention relates to hospitality media systems that provide pay-per-use media functions in guest rooms of a hospitality establishment.
(2) Description of the Related Art
Free-to-guest entertainment media content such as television within guest rooms is generally provided by hospitality establishments such as hotels to meet guests' basic in-room entertainment expectations. For example, a hotel may purchase rights to distribute cable and/or satellite television channels to the guest rooms. Rights to satellite radio content or other multi-media content may also be purchased by the hotel and made available in the guest rooms.
Although free-to-guest entertainment options are well received by guests, the hotel does incur costs to provide these services and therefore there are limits on the amount of in-room content that can be provided for free. If a hotel wishes to provide increased free media content options to guests, the hotel must either incur the additional licensing costs, or raise room rates or other service fees to cover the additional licensing costs.
Pay-per-use systems have also been developed for use in hotels including, for example, pay-per-view (PPV) for live sporting events and video-on-demand (VOD) for feature Hollywood movies. In addition to allowing hotels to provide highly desirable content for guest viewing, pay-per-use often becomes a secondary revenue stream for the hotel. The reason is the hotel may add an additional, hidden fee onto the royalty cost of the content. For example, each time a guest pays $11.99 to watch an in-room VOD movie, the hotel may keep $5.99 as profit and pay a $6.00 royalty to the content provider. Pay-per-use systems are generally more expensive for the hotel to install and support than free-to-guest offerings due to the interactive nature and requirement to bill guests in real time.
Although pay-per-use systems are routinely used by some guests, the same systems are often shunned by other guests who have an aversion to additional in-room usage fees. The result is that a hotel makes a considerable investment to install a pay-per-use system while a significant number of the hotel's guests do not utilize the pay-per-use media functions and therefore see no initial direct benefit. Over time the increased revenue from the pay-per-use system may allow the hotel to expand its free-to-guest offerings; however, in the short term, the opposite may be true—that is, the hotel may need to avoid expanding or even reduce the free-to-guest offerings in order to lessen the installation and reoccurring support costs of the pay-per-use system. This further detracts from the experience of guests who are not interested in trying out the pay-per-use system because of the additional usage fees.